During the currently ongoing GUADEC conference in Den Haag the GNOME release team announced that GNOME 3.0 would be delayed for another six months and is now scheduled for March 2011. "We could release in September and have something working that is okayish, but it's not up to the standards we have" release team member Vincent Untz explains the reasoning. There's coverage of this issue at derStandard.at and an official GNOME press release.

Irrelevant, because that porting is already happening, and has been for years. Most of the "new APIs" are things that have been gradually added to 2.x over the past few years, and much of the actual Gnome 3 porting effort is in getting applications to stop using old APIs that 3.x is dropping.

I now that, much of Gnome 3.0 is to remove legacy stuf (bonobo,gconf,exposing internal structure in gtk, theme engine...). But does for example dConf or new theme engine support the need of all application? How many application does access internal structures in gtk in their own legacy code, and does gtk+ 3.0 api let them do what these 2.0 application need it to do? The new theming engine with CSS support, how well is it tested?

Well written 2.x apps and libraries can be ported to 3.x just by running a search/replace over their Makefile, no code changes required. Some of them are even doing that during the transition, able to pick one or the other at build time.

I am well aware of this, but how many "bad" written 2.x apps exist? They will need to be ported/rewritten also.